It’s been couple of weeks that we are in the Atlantic ocean, you ma y think that we see the same scenery or the same picture everyday, just a blue ocean for 360 degrees, wherever you turn your eyes it’s just water. However, if you look deeper into it, you will notice t hat every day is totally different than the other, the sea state, w aves size, sky color, clouds, sunshine, wind speed, currents, (captain’s mood) … if one of this factors changes, you have a completely different day or scenery.
When you are on a sailboat you feel you are kinda paradoxical, you love to have a peaceful flat ocean with no big waves to have a fun sailing day, in the meantime you wish to have some good wind to move forward since without it, you will go nowhere, or you will have to put on the engine and cruise waiting for the wind to pick up. The sea state or the waves size depends directly on the wind speed, and currents as well of course, the stronger the wind blows, the bigger the waves, and the longest it blows the bigger seas you get. For instance, if the wind blows constantly hard for two days you may get around 3 meters waves, if it blows constantly for three days it may get to 5m and so on. ( not literally, but just an example) Sometimes you get some swells that are coming from far away where the wind was blowing so hard and it gets to the place where you are even if there’s no wind at your location. So you have no wind with big swells. You can also get sometimes that situation where you have two swells coming from two different directions when the wind changes directions.